T^he Reinicker Lectures for 1906 

THE PUCE AND FUNCTION 

OF THE 

SUNDAY SCHOOL 
IN THE CHURCH 



By the 
Rt. Rev. William Paret, D.D. 




ri;issJDA5^lO 


Hook i KS 


Cnnvrielif \° 


COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 






The Reinicker Lectures for jgo6 

The Place and Function 

of the 

Sunday School in the Church 



By the 
Rt. Rev. William Paret, D. D. 

Bishop of Maryland 



NEW YORK 
THOMAS WHITTAKER 

2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE 



LIBRARY of G0i:3RESS 

Two Copies Received 
SEP 24 1906 

^epynarht Ei 



it Entry 

;, "roc 



CLASS^^ XXc, No. 
COPY B. 



Copyright, 1906, 

by 

Thomas Whittaker 






The Place and Function of the 
Sunday School in the Church 



LECTURE I 

It is a helpful thing for me that those who hon- 
ored me with the request that I should prepare and 
give the Reinicker Lectures, suggested, in doing so, 
a subject which I was very glad to accept. It is 
" The Place and Function of the Sunday School in 
the Church," and the simple naming of that subject 
brings us face to face with the greater subject on 
which it rests, the duty and relation of the Church 
to children. I fear that in the Church, as we know 
it to-day, we are losing, if we have not already lost, 
our grandest opportunities for the training and 
instruction of those who are to be the Church in the 
coming generation. I blame myself; I blame our 
theological seminaries ; I blame our general idea of 
theological education and of candidates for Holy 
Orders, that so little attention is given to training 

5 



6 The Place and Function of the 

those who are to be pastors, in the details of prac- 
tical pastoral work and method for the young. 

Bear with me then, if I have first of all in my 
thoughts now those among you who are preparing 
for the sacred ministry. I want to help them to 
feel their own awful personal responsibility. 

When our Lord re-admitted St. Peter to the pas- 
toral office which, by his sinful denial, had been 
forfeited, the first command, before He said to him, 
" Feed My sheep," was " Feed My lambs." Our 
Lord never used words carelessly, and we may be 
sure that there was divine purpose, not only in that 
distinction of words, but in the order in which 
He chose to use them. The lambs of His flock 
were first in His thought as He was speaking of 
pastoral duty. And you know how high a place 
His ministries and blessings to children filled in His 
personal work on earth ; how gladly He received 
them ; how lovingly and closely He gathered them 
in His arms ; how He rebuked those who would 
have hindered ; how He made them the very ideal 
for fitness for heaven and for God's presence. More 
and more the Church seems to be losing the pro- 
portions of pastoral work, as He presented them. 



Sunday School in the Church 7 

The children do not hold the place in the Church's 
loving care which they held in His. In almost all 
our parishes, in our organizations, in our services, 
in our preaching, in our use of Sundays, in our 
methods of parochial work, the older ones, the 
grown people, occupy almost all the thought, the 
time, the pastoral anxiety, and interest. The chil- 
dren do not come to Church. They are not ex- 
pected. Place is not provided for them. If any 
do come, they are often made to feel that they are 
in the way ; that the service is for their elders, and 
they are there only by toleration. The sermons 
are far over their heads, and not meant for them ; 
written without thought of them. If there is a 
Sunday-school room, very often little pains are 
taken to make it inviting and beautiful. Little life 
and care are put in its prayers and hymns. It goes 
on in a half careless way, with no strong, inspiring 
leader, each teacher according to his or her wisdom 
or unwisdom, left to pursue his or her own indi- 
vidual method. It wakes no enthusiasm in the 
children. It has no unity, no singleness of purpose 
or method. Nay, worse, I have reason to know 
that some of the clergy have come to treat the Sun- 



8 The Place and Function of the 

day-school almost as an irksome instance of their 
professional duty, which they must have, because it 
is expected, but which they are glad to get through 
as quickly and easily as possible, that their strength 
and earnestness may be saved for what they count 
the more important services, in which all richness 
and beauty, and all the power of music, and the 
best efforts of the pastor's intellect are devoted to 
interesting, pleasing, and, perhaps, instructing those 
who, as older persons and contributors, are counted 
as of more importance than the children. It is a 
sad picture. There are some grand instances of 
nobler and better things. But, taking the average 
of city and country churches, I do not think I have 
exaggerated. 

Let me, then, beg of you especially, who are pre- 
paring for a place in that blessed partnership with 
Christ, let me beg you, at the peril of your own 
souls, neglect not the little ones. Give them large 
part, very large, in your thoughts, in your prayers, 
in your pastoral visiting and personal intercourse, 
in your time, in your sermons, in your Sundays, 
and in the distribution of the hours of service. 

Now, the Sunday-school is one of the methods 



Sunday School in the Church 9 

and helps for this pastoral care of children. But it 
is not the only one, nor can it be fully helpful if 
separated from the others. It was not the original 
method. There were no Sunday-schools in the 
Jewish Church, as God ordered it. There were no 
Sunday-schools in the early Christian Church, as 
ordered by the inspired apostles. In the second or 
third generation after them, there did grow up an 
order of catechists, who taught in catechetical 
schools. But these were nothing like our Sunday- 
schools — first, because they were not held on Sun- 
days; and secondly, because they were not for 
children, but only for the instruction of adult per- 
sons coming out of heathenism, needing the teach- 
ing in Christian truth, which was required before 
they could be baptized. The Sunday-school, as we 
know it, had its beginning only one hundred and 
twenty-five years ago, when, in the city of Glouces- 
ter, in England, Robert Raikes, a printer, tried 
to meet a very great need. Very large numbers of 
young children came in from the country to work 
in the factories. And finding them left to them- 
selves, without home influence or parental oversight 
and teaching, and growing up in immorality and 



io The Place and Function of the 

ignorance of Christian truth, he, with the help of 
two or three others, began to gather some of them 
on Sundays, to teach them to read and write, and 
to give them the simplest elements of Christian 
knowledge. Out of this very simple beginning has 
grown the present immense Sunday-school work, 
but with some serious changes. With Raikes, its 
first purpose was not to give religious teaching, but 
to give, in the alphabet and reading, the first ele- 
ments of ordinary secular knowledge to those too 
poor, or too closely at work, to be able to attend 
the week-day schools. It was a purely charitable 
system, meant only for the very poor. Now, it is 
exclusively for the religious teaching — for the rich 
quite as much as for the poor — and too largely used 
to relieve parents from their parental responsibility 
and duty. 

The divine ideal was parental teaching and train- 
ing. The father was the teacher of his household. 
Abraham commanded his children after him, so that 
they kept the way of the Lord. God said to each 
parent, concerning the words of His law, " Thou 
shalt teach them diligently to thy children/' And 
grandly was that law of tradition kept. Even in their 



Sunday School in the Church 1 1 

long years of captivity in Egypt and in Babylon, 
where public worship was not possible, the knowl- 
edge of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, 
and the grand event of God's dealing with them was 
kept alive. And grandly is that household tradition 
kept sacred by the Hebrews of to-day. I am very 
sure there is no community of Christians, where 
children are so carefully trained in pious habits and 
knowledge in their home life, as among the Jews. 

There were, indeed, just before and during the 
time of our Lord's life on earth, schools connected 
with the synagogue and taught by some of their 
officers ; and in them, besides the teaching of the 
letters and reading, the important parts of the law 
of God were explained, and the scholars were re- 
quired to commit them to memory. But they were 
not like Sunday-schools. They were day schools. 
The religious element entered so largely not to dis- 
tinguish them from other kinds of teaching, as our 
Sunday-schools are distinguished from our week-day 
schools, but because the religious element held so 
large a place in the daily life of every household. 
They were more like what the Church of England 
day schools were for the past four or five generations, 



12 The Place and Function of the 

where the pastor or some one authorized by him 
had free access and regular duty in seeing that the 
school life and training, instead of having God left 
out, as they are leaving Him out in France, and ex- 
cluding even His name from their school books, 
should have the religious life and influence in it ; as 
not something to be kept for a separate time and 
place, but as incorporated with the daily life and 
thought. 

Unhappily, the conditions of our times and our 
people, with the diversities and jealousies of religious 
sects and teaching, seem, in the judgment of many, 
to have made the exclusion of religion from our pub- 
lic schools a necessity. And the children are being 
practically taught that religion is not a thing for 
week-day life, but only for Sundays. Alas, that 
with Christians, the devout parental diligence in 
home life so rarely supplies that want, as it is done 
in almost every Jewish household. 

Again, in the early days of the Christian Church, 
there were no Sunday-schools. The New Testa- 
ment gives no place nor suggestion for them. The 
family training was the ideal. The parents were 
commanded to " bring up their children in the nur- 



Sunday School in the Church 13 

ture and admonition of the Lord." And the happy 
result is instanced in the case of Timothy, whose 
knowledge of the Scriptures St. Paul dates back to 
childhood, and traces to the holy teaching and in- 
fluence of his mother and grandmother. (And yet, 
they were the Old Testament Scriptures only which 
he knew so well ; and those two devout women, 
Jewesses, in their early life, were carrying on into 
their Christian relations the holy habits of their 
former household life.) 

But though the Sunday-school, as we know it, 
can be traced back only one hundred and twenty- 
five years, and though the early catechizings were 
for adult persons only, it should not be assumed 
that during the intervening centuries the re- 
ligious training of children had been neglected. 
On the contrary, very great attention was given to 
it ; nor is it true that such attention began with the 
Reformation in England, and in Germany. There 
are many important points, both in doctrine and in 
worship, in which we are sure that the Roman was 
then in error and is in error still. And it was the 
greatness of those errors which led to and justified the 
Reformation. All the more carefully and willingly 



14 The Place and Function of the 

should we give credit for the good things which that 
Church, amidst its errors, still held fast. And con- 
spicuous among those good things was its loving 
diligence in caring for children's souls : conspicuous 
then, and conspicuous now, by their increasing dili- 
gence, by the money they expend on their schools, 
by the number of well-trained persons employed in 
the work, and by the fulness and exactness of their 
catechetical instruction, in which they now do 
much more by their week-day parish schools than 
it would be possible to do on Sundays only. Be- 
fore the Council of Trent, it was counted as an es- 
sential part of priestly duties, and Bishops so urged 
it upon their clergy. It had not, until that time, 
taken such definite form in catechetical manuals, and 
in prescribed methods, but was left rather to individual 
pastoral diligence. More than one hundred years 
before the Council of Trent, the famous Gerson, 
Archbishop and Cardinal and Chancellor of the 
great university of Paris, published a treatise ad- 
dressed to the clergy, on the importance of faithful- 
ness in this duty. In one of the decrees of that 
Council, it is commanded that " The Bishops shall 
take care that, at least on the Lord's Day and 



Sunday School in the Church 15 

other festivals, the children in every parish be dili- 
gently taught the rudiments of the faith and obedi- 
ence towards God and their parents, by those whom 
it concerns ; and, if need be, they shall constrain 
them even by ecclesiastical censures, any privileges 
and customs notwithstanding." 

Immediately, there was throughout the Roman 
Church a very great increase in systematic dili- 
gence. A great number of Bishops in Italy, in 
Spain, in France, in Germany, at once issued minute 
instructions and forms. There was no generally 
authoritative catechism like ours in the Prayer 
Book, but each Diocese had its own method, and 
many of the Bishops led by their own diligent per- 
sonal example. Even more than one hundred years 
before, Gerson, before mentioned as Archbishop, 
Cardinal and Chancellor, himself catechized the 
children regularly at St. Paul's church, in Lyons, 
and gave up his later years entirely to that work. 
The great and good Charles Borromeo, Archbishop 
of Milan, in like manner catechized personally. 
The famous Bellarmin gathered the children in his 
cathedral for his own personal instruction. 

St. Francis de Sales did the same. A witness said : 



l6 The Place and Function of the 

" I had the honor of being present at his blessed 
catechizing. Never have I seen such a sight. The 
good father, on a seat raised by five steps, was sur- 
rounded by the infantile army. It was a wondrous 
happiness to hear how familiarly he set forth the 
rudiments of the faith. He watched his little flock, 
and they watched him. He made himself a child 
among them/' 

Another instance was that of Ignatius Loyola, 
who, for forty-six successive days, taught the chil- 
dren who came in crowds to him in one of the 
churches in Rome. And he made it a rule of his 
order that each superior, in entering on his duties, 
should catechize for forty days. It would be a 
very long list should I name all. But among them 
I may mention those known as S. Philip de Neri, 
and S. Vincent de Paul, as not only exhorting oth- 
ers to this work, but as doing it diligently them- 
selves. The latter having learned that one of his 
priests had slighted the public catechizing, wrote 
to him as follows : " I am very sorry to hear that 
instead of the public catechizing, you have substi- 
tuted the preaching of a sermon. This is wrong, 
for the people have greater need of the catechizing 



Sunday School in the Church 17 

and profit by it more." The list might well be 
continued even down to our own days, and crowned 
by the name of one of the best Bishops in the 
Church of France, which is so much nearer to our 
own. I mean the great Bishop of Orleans, Bishop 
Dupanloup, perhaps, the greatest catechist of the 
age. 

Amid the sadness of having greatly to differ from 
some who bear with us the Christian name, it is 
helpful and comforting thus to see and own the 
things in which they set us so good an example. 

Coming now to later times, and our own 
Church, I must ask you to look for the Church's 
ideal and method in this matter in her authorized 
standard, the Book of Common Prayer. Take the 
Prayer Book of this national Church, and that of 
the Church of England, from which it is framed, 
and they will carry us back more than three hun- 
dred years. 

Take the earlier standards and laws, and you will 
find in them no direction or suggestion for any- 
thing like our present Sunday-schools. But you 
will find, instead, a very positive and very differ- 
ent rule and method, a method which prescribes 



18 The Place and Function of the 

the order and substance of what is to be taught, 
the place where the teaching is to be done, and 
the person by whom the teaching is to be given. 
And that person is the pastor. Or, to use the 
exact words of the rule in the Prayer Book, " the 
minister of every parish." It does not tell him to 
appoint some one else to do the teaching. He him- 
self is to do it. It is made a necessary part of the 
pastoral relation and duty. He cannot wash his 
hands from that responsibility by turning it over 
to a Sunday-school. The place, also, is distinctly 
appointed. It is to be " openly in the Church ; " that 
is under the influence of the sacredness of the holy 
place. It tells him definitely what he is to teach : 
" some part of this catechism." Now, put together 
the things provided and see what a clear method 
is marked out. First, the holy parental relation, 
about which I have already spoken somewhat 
fully. Next, the grace of God given in holy 
baptism. Next, the watchful love and prayers and 
teaching of sponsors ; one of the wisest provisions 
of the Church's care, but oh, how shamefully 
abused ! How it has degenerated into a merely 
social form or ceremony! The solemn charge is 



Sunday School in the Church 19 

given : " Ye are to see that this child be taught so 
soon as he shall be able to learn; " " Ye are to take 
care that this child be brought to the Bishop to 
be confirmed. ,, In hardly one case out of a hun- 
dred is this sacred duty done. The sponsors seem 
to think that their only duty is to appear at the 
service of baptism and to make the required re- 
sponses. What a power for good the sponsor's 
office would be if it were honestly and earnestly 
used ! Then comes the pastor's part, not to re- 
lieve parents and sponsors from their duty, but to 
help them in it, and to lead the children into the 
deeper and more spiritual meaning of the holy 
truths. And then the confirmation and the prepa- 
ration for and the bringing to the Holy Communion. 
There is a cry becoming quite popular for graded 
classes and graded teaching in the Sunday-schools. 
But whose shall be the wisdom which could pre- 
pare any grading which would surpass or equal this 
the Church's own graded method for her little 
ones? 

The Church's method for the training of chil- 
dren, as it stands on paper, is one of the most per- 
fect and admirable that could be arranged. If car- 



20 The Place and Function of the 

ried out in real action, the results would surely 
be excellent. But when parents who care anx- 
iously for the bodies and minds of their children 
take little or no thought for their souls, and leave 
undone the duty laid upon them, both by nature and 
by God's express command ; when sponsors utterly 
neglect and forget their solemn sacramental obli- 
gations; when pastors surrender to others their 
sacred responsibility, we cannot wonder that with 
the best and most beautiful theory for Christian 
education, we are failing to win and keep the chil- 
dren. 

But it may be asked whether in thus magnifying 
and insisting on the Church's method as found in 
Bible and Prayer Book, I am not belittling the 
Sunday-school and leaving no place for it. Far 
from it. I am only trying to determine its right 
place ; for if it does not keep to its proper place 
and relation, it will not be helpful, but harmful. 
And that place is simply as an auxiliary to the 
Church's higher ideal and method. If the Sunday- 
school really helps to the carrying out of that 
ideal, if it helps parents to do their duty, helps spon- 
sors to do their duty, helps the pastors to reach 



Sunday School in the Church 21 

and teach the children, its work will be full of 
blessing. But so far as it is practically made a 
substitute for any of these, and relieves them from 
the sense of their own responsibility, in so far, it 
will be harmful. And so we reach, I think, a clear 
answer to the question, " What is the relation and 
function of the Sunday-school in the Church ? " It 
is to be a pastoral agency under pastoral control for 
more efficiently carrying out the Prayer Book ideal 
of Christian education. It is to help the pastor as 
he tries to find access to the children's souls. 

Let us think, then, somewhat more plainly about 
the relation of the Sunday-school to the pastor, and 
of the pastor to the Sunday-school. I say " pas- 
tor," and not " rector/' here, because the former 
word denotes the spiritual relation, and the latter is 
the word for civil or ecclesiastical authority ; and 
also because there are often those who have full 
pastoral authority, as appointed missionaries or 
ministers in charge, without legal right of perma- 
nence. I do not believe that there can be, nay, I 
am sure there cannot be, a really true and effective 
Church Sunday-school, accomplishing the spiritual 
results for which it is meant, unless the pastor is at 



22 The Place and Function of the 

once its head and its heart. He must be its life, its 
inspiration, its impulse, its central power. He must 
put into it his own life, his individuality, his spirit- 
uality. He must organize it, must control it, must 
direct it, must make his own influence its rule. He 
must know and control the teaching, both what is 
taught and the methods of teaching. I pity the 
pastor who surrenders to an association of teachers 
the right to determine by vote the course of lessons 
and the books. He is losing so much of his pas- 
toral power when in that, or in any other way, the 
Sunday-school is separated from the pastor, or 
comes to think it can do its own work without him ; 
when it looks upon the pastor's occasional presence 
as the coming in of a visitor to show a little interest 
in the work of some one else ; when the pastor 
turns over the responsibility to some one else, and 
does not trouble himself with details ; when officers 
and teachers feel that they are the controlling and 
directing power, then the Sunday-school, however 
thriving it may seem, is really becoming mischiev- 
ous, because it is taking the children away from that 
immediate pastoral watchfulness and guidance which 
the Lord entrusted to His ministers. I am sure, 



Sunday School in the Church 23 

from long observation and careful study, that we 
touch here one of the greatest defects of our Sun- 
day-school work; the chief reason for its loss of 
spiritual power. There may be a most admirable 
superintendent, a school organized and ordered after 
the most popular modern methods, and with most 
minute exactness, well qualified officers and earnest 
teachers, well chosen lines of study ; but unless the 
pastor is there, with the pastor's love, with the pas- 
tor's head and the pastor's heart, it may seem to 
work excellently in intellectual results and machine- 
like order and financial fruits, but it will have no 
soul, no love, little spiritual fruit. I repeat, then, 
that the first requisite for a true and helpful Sunday- 
school is the pastor's enthusiasm, the pastor's pres- 
ence, the pastor's love. 

But when I have urged this upon the clergy, I 
have sometimes been told that it is impossible, un- 
der the present methods and demands of Church 
work. If this be so (I do not acknowledge it, but) 
if it be so, then, most emphatically, the present 
methods and demands of Church work must be 
wrong, radically wrong. If the children have not 
the place and part in the Church's work which the 



24 The Place and Function of the 

Lord means for them, it is time for a great change 
and re-ordering. No multiplication of services, no 
machinery of guilds and institutions, no untiring 
diligence of house to house visiting for older per- 
sons, can be an excuse for lack of pastoral, earnest 
love, and definite pastoral work for the children. 
If it is not possible, under the present methods of 
Church working, to give great pastoral care to the 
children, then, I repeat it, our methods must be 
wrong. But I deny that it is impossible. The 
busiest pastor, if he have the pastor's heart for chil- 
dren, can so order his own methods as to accom- 
plish it. There are some, in my own knowledge, 
whose pastoral work is of the largest and the most 
exacting, who do this work for children grandly ; 
and their success proves its possibility for others. 
I imagine the rector of a large city parish, say with 
eight hundred or a thousand, or, perhaps, more 
names on its roll of communicants ; he has one or 
more assistant ministers, and, with their help, he 
keeps up the round of daily services, the multiplied 
communion, often twice or thrice a day, the many 
Sunday services and preachings, the frequent meet- 
ings of brotherhoods, guilds, and charitable organi- 



Sunday School in the Church 25 

zations, the visiting of the sick and the ministering 
to the poor. I imagine one of our younger men 
as, in riper years, likely to come to such position. 
And he might naturally ask us to tell him how, 
when that time shall come, he can, with all the in- 
cessant pressure of those complicated necessary 
duties, find time to add or bring in the other work 
of close personal push and influence with the chil- 
dren and in Sunday-school work. 

And the question, in the form just proposed, sug- 
gests its own answer. It implies that all those 
other things must be done, and that this may be 
done. It implies that those things must first be 
cared for, and then this children's and Sunday- 
school business be added on, or brought in, if some 
little time and energy possibly be left. And just 
there is the vital error. Grant that the Holy Com- 
munion every Sunday was the primitive rule, and 
the Church's ideal. There is no law of the Church 
and no requirement or suggestion from the Lord 
for many administrations on the same day. They 
may in some few cases be helpful. But if for the 
sake of them, the Lord's own command, " Feed My 
lambs," is thrust into the background, then be sure 



26 The Place and Function of the 

that the multitude of services will be less pleasing 
to Him, and will bring Him less fruit than fewer 
celebrations, and more loving work for the children. 
It is cheering sometimes to hear the pastor read in 
his Sunday announcements the long list of daily 
or more than daily appointments and for the meeting 
of a great many excellent parish organizations, giving 
'full and frequent provision for the spiritual privilege 
and blessing of the devout of full age. But I am 
sometimes sad when the list is ended, to note that 
with all that abundant provision for older souls, 
the little ones can scarcely touch the crumbs of 
pastoral care and love. If the rector of the largest 
and busiest city parish will put the spiritual work 
for children (not the providing of food or clothing 
or Christmas trees or entertainments, but) the real 
loving spiritual care for them, in the place which 
the Lord claims for them, among the very fore- 
most, and he can and will not only find time to 
attend to it personally, but he will very soon know 
that in that fulfilment of holy responsibility, there 
are some of the very richest joys and greatest con- 
solations and comforts of the pastor's life. 

But while I thus insist upon the pastor's presence 



Sunday School in the Church 27 

and his control and direction in his Sunday-* 
school. I do not mean that he is necessarily 
to be there from first to last, taking immediate, 
direct administration of every session and of all 
its details. He would lose his spiritual influence 
if the children saw him habitually busying him- 
self with the minute inspection of roll-books, 
and library cards, and class discipline and little 
irregularities of behavior. The general who com- 
mands an army and inspires it, and keeps it up 
to discipline, and plans and directs its movements, 
has officers whom he trusts, and to whom he 
commits the carrying out of his plans and on 
whose fidelity and loyalty to him he can de- 
pend. The president of some great university is 
responsible for all its working. He, taking counsel, 
plans and organizes its various departments, selects 
or approves its professors, harmonizes their different 
duties into unity of method and purpose, holds 
them all together, leads and controls, and yet he 
does not needlessly busy himself with the details of 
the class-room methods and work of each professor. 
The general's presence and control are strongly felt 
in the army ; the president's presence and control 



28 The Place and Function of the 

are felt in the university, although in minute mat- 
ters he uses others and trusts them largely. And 
so, while the pastor must be responsible, and include 
in himself the entire responsibility, he may and he 
must delegate to others special and definite authority 
in certain departments, making all, however, re- 
sponsible to him. 

So, in our study of the functions of the Sunday- 
school, it becomes important to study this delegated 
authority in the workers. Chief among such work- 
ers, and the one on whom efficiency will largely de- 
pend, will be the officer commonly known as the 
superintendent ; and the right relation between the 
pastor and this his chief helper is of very great im- 
portance. There have been cases where the pastor 
has surrendered authority, absolutely to the super- 
intendent, and washed his own hands from responsi- 
bility. The true and helpful superintendent is not 
the pastor's substitute, but his loyal helper, his chief 
executive officer, throwing himself heartily into the 
pastor's plans and wishes ; not substituting his own 
for them, but doing his utmost to make them ef- 
fective and successful. He is like the second in 
command in an army ; with real authority in his 



Sunday School in the Church 29 

office, and yet using that authority only in loving con- 
formity to an authority still superior. It has been 
sad to me, sometimes, to see Sunday-schools where 
the superintendent seemed to resent the pastor's 
presence and influence, and to count it almost an 
interference with his own office and rights. And it 
was my own happiness that in the very large Sun- 
day-schools of the Church of the Epiphany in 
Washington, in three large divisions, which were 
practically separate schools, I had as superintendents 
men of true godliness, sound in doctrine, men of 
strong intellect and wide reading, and of administra- 
tive ability, who gave all those admirable qualifica- 
tions to the unfaltering carrying out of the pastor's 
plans and methods. 

And the pastor, having such a superintendent 
must assist him largely. Confident of his helper's 
loyalty, he must not be too closely prying into the 
details of the work. It may be that matters will 
not always go perfectly. There come times in the 
best schools, when discipline will seem relaxed, 
when there is some disorder, some hitch, or annoy- 
ance. And as the pastor notes it, he must not step 
between the superintendent and the school in any 



30 The Place and Function of the 

of the details or incidents of immediate government 
or order, which have been committed to that 
officer's oversight. He will be as jealously careful to 
uphold the superintendent's authority in the school, 
as he would be to have his own upheld. In such 
matters he may take counsel with his chief officer, 
give him advice if need be, but will leave to him 
the execution of the things determined. In other 
words, the loyalty must be reciprocal. The super- 
intendent must be loyal to the pastor, and the pas- 
tor must be loyal to the superintendent. Happy the 
pastor, happy the school, happy the children where 
there is such provision ! And to secure it, it is 
plain that the choice of the superintendent must be 
made by the pastor himself. It is to be his execu- 
tive officer, not one to carry out the will and wishes 
of the teachers and scholars, but the pastor's will 
and wishes. The ideas of democracy, run wild, 
have sometimes insisted that American principles 
are dishonored unless all the officers of the school, 
from superintendent down, are elected by the teach- 
ers. And to accomplish this, Sunday schools some- 
times organize themselves as self-governing, inde- 
pendent associations. But the full personal confi- 



Sunday School in the Church 31 

dence and intimate relation I have tried to describe 
could not be secured by such election. He is to be 
the pastor's friend, and the pastor alone will know 
where to look for the necessary qualifications. 

And as for those necessary qualities, he must first 
of all be a man of deep and earnest piety. 
Alas ! that word " piety/' through the sneering of 
some, has come to have an almost unhappy sense, 
and to denote the boastful affectation of devotion, 
the words, and the manner of godliness, rather than 
its deep reality. I am thinking rather of that real 
piety which God himself describes and praises in 
Cornelius : " A devout man and one that feared God 
with all his house, who gave much alms to the peo- 
ple, and prayed to God always." 

None but one who loves God can teach others to 
love Him. None but one who himself prays can 
teach others to pray. None but one who himself 
studies the Holy Scriptures can rightly lead others 
into its truth and power. None but he who makes 
the Lord Jesus Christ his own daily pattern can inspire 
others to follow those blessed footsteps. I do not 
mean that the man with these qualities is to be held 
up as a shining example, that these qualities are to 



32 The Place and Function of the 

have such outward effect. I mean that these 
qualities must be in the man ; must make the char- 
acter, out of which is to come the real spiritual 
power of his work. I can imagine a man without 
these qualities making an efficient teacher or head 
master in one of our public schools from which re- 
ligious teaching and influence are largely excluded ; 
but not an efficient head master for a Sunday-school. 
But besides this, the pastor will seek for one 
with good intellectual qualities and knowledge. 
There will be times when the pastor will be neces- 
sarily absent, and the superintendent must be 
ready to take his place in the general catechizing. 
And for an efficient catechist there will be needed 
not only careful study of the special lesson or sub- 
ject for the day, but such readiness and clearness 
of general sacred knowledge, as may help to illus- 
trate and brighten the lesson otherwise. And the 
mind best filled with such knowledge, and best 
stored, and best trained in its powers by large 
general reading, will be best fitted for the work. 
Other things being equal a man of culture will 
make the best superintendent. And he must be 
an enthusiastic lover of children. It may not be 



Sunday School in the Church 33 

easy to secure such admirably furnished helpers. 
But zeal for God and high mental qualities do often 
go together; and the pastor will seek for that 
happy union. I do believe that it can be done more 
often than it is. At any rate, we should seek for 
such, and not take the first fair man who offers 
himself, accepting willingness as a sufficient quali- 
fication. Most probably, the man needed will not 
offer himself. You may have to search him out 
and go after him, and then find him unwilling. 
When I remember how men in England like Glad- 
stone and Selborne and many others like them, 
found time and heart and love, in the midst of 
overwhelming duties, to bring their nobly trained 
powers and their great attainments to Christ's serv- 
ice in Sunday-school work, I look in amazement 
on the nobly fitted laymen of our own land who 
stand all the day idle. I see many of them devout 
towards God, grandly educated, trained in legal or 
other business ways, with personal qualities nobly 
cultivated, and yet, thinking they fulfil all their re- 
sponsibilities for holy use of such talents in acting as 
vestrymen, and attending the conventions and doing 
something on the secular side of Church business. 



34 The Place and Function of the 

If we have such men among our people, let us go 
after them. The best man is not always the man 
who seeks the place, but the man that the place 
calls for. Do not ask it as a favor ; call for it as a 
duty. Tell them God wants them ; He has given 
them the talent. He is not willing they should 
bury it. Speak to such with pastoral boldness and 
pastoral love and claim their powers for God. 

But if, with all earnestness in seeking, the really 
strong man for the office cannot be had, the good, 
strong man who can be trusted, if we cannot get 
the man we need, shall we put up with the weak 
man we can get? And I say, emphatically, no! 
The superintendent is not absolutely necessary. 
A good superintendent will be a great help ; a poor 
one, or a weak one, will do great harm. We can 
do without a superintendent, if the right man can- 
not be had. One of the teachers can be asked to 
take a little authority. Or, best of all, the rector 
will be his own superintendent. It can be done, 
and if the rector gives to the work for children 
the place in the pastoral heart which the Lord 
wants it to have, however busy he may be, he will 
find the way to do it. I say this from personal ex- 



Sunday School in the Church 35 

perience. Before God called me to a Bishop's 
work, I had thirty-three years as a parish priest, 
and, during twenty-five years, with never less than 
two congregations to serve, I was always my own 
superintendent. And I look back upon those years 
as among the most fruitful with the young, and 
the most helpful for the larger work which came 
afterwards. 

But let us stop here for the present. In pre- 
senting one's ideal of the function of the Sunday- 
school in its relation to the Church, we have, it 
seems, been thinking of its possibilities in the 
stronger parishes. In talking on this subject, one 
recently said to me : " Yes, that is all very good 
for a strong city church that has money enough to 
provide good rooms and people enough to draw upon 
for teachers and officers, and for many scholars, 
but what am I to do ? A poor, country parson, 
with only a handful of people, and those very poor 
and not of the best education ; with not more than 
fifteen or twenty children that I can possibly bring 
together ; with no well-qualified teachers, and with 
no possibility of a good superintendent. And I an- 
swered : " My good brother, the Church makes your 



36 The Place and Function of the 

way plain. Follow her directions. Pass by classes 
and teachers and officers, and take those chil- 
dren under your own immediate, authoritative and 
loving pastoral care. If you have two services on 
Sunday in your country parish, give one of those 
services to your children in public catechizing and 
instruction ; put your mind and heart in it ; train 
them to take part in the regular service, and then, 
instead of a formal sermon, teach them. And the 
results will astonish you. Interest and win the 
children and they will bring the parents. It has 
been proved. I have known a city church where 
the average attendance at the second service was 
only sixty or seventy. The public catechizing was 
substituted for the sermon, and, in a year's time, 
that sixty or seventy had grown to three hundred. 
In St. Luke's church, Baltimore, large enough to 
hold some eight hundred people, its rector, the 
Rev. Dr. Rankin, for many years held such a cate- 
chizing ; and very soon there was not an unoccu- 
pied seat in the church. The Church's appointed 
methods, as given in the Prayer Book, may not 
always agree with popular modern methods, but 
you may be sure they are the best. I sometimes 



Sunday School in the Church 37 

think that the Prayer Book is almost inspired, not 
with that immediate inspiration which God gave to 
the human penmen of the Holy Scriptures, but 
with an indirect and secondary inspiration, as the 
fruit of the experience of that Church to which 
Christ promised His own presence and help. 

And so we come back to the question with which 
we began : the place and function of the Sunday- 
school in the Church. It is to be the pastor's 
helper in fulfilling the sacred responsibility which 
Christ has laid upon him, to be himself teacher 
and guide of the children. 

Whatever the apparent success of a Sunday- 
school in numbers, in order, in financial results, 
in Easter offerings and Christmas festivals, if it 
separates the children from the pastor, it is a 
spiritual failure. And the little country or mission 
Sunday-school, with no superintendent, almost no 
teachers, and scholars so few as not to permit any 
definite organization, may be keeping pastor and 
children near each other, and thus, in the Lord's 
judgment, a success. 



LECTURE II 

In speaking of the place and function of the Sun- 
day-school in the Church, it becomes necessary, be- 
sides thinking of it as a whole, to think of the rela- 
tions and workings of its several points. In my 
first lecture, I did so speak of the pastor and of the 
superintendent, I wish now to speak of teachers and 
scholars. 

Among the confidences which come to a Bishop, 
and the request from clergymen for special coun- 
sel, the difficulties and perplexities in Sunday-school 
work come very often. And the point most fre- 
quently presented is about the teachers ; the difficulty 
of getting teachers enough ; of getting teachers well 
qualified for the work ; of half-hearted teachers ; of 
teachers with no heart at all in their work ; of teach- 
ers who claim to be independent and will not con- 
form to Sunday-school rules. And out of the study 
thus required of me, and the long pastoral expe- 
rience which went before, I venture to set forth some 
principles on these points : 

What, then, is the real, true office of the teacher ? 

38 



Sunday School in the Church 39 

And what his or her relation to the Sunday- 
school? If it be merely, or chiefly, to gain the 
interest and affection of a few children, to please 
them, so that they will come regularly ; to keep 
them in decent order ; to mark their attendance and 
library books, and to hear, with routine exactness, 
the appointed lesson, the office does not require any 
very high qualifications. There is no call in all this 
for much heart, for much spiritual life, for any great 
devoutness or careful knowledge. Almost any one of 
ordinary, decent life, without even being confirmed 
or a communicant, without personal devoutness or 
strong purpose, might take the office, if able only to 
give the Sunday hour and a half to the routine du- 
ties. And, unfortunately, many Sunday-school 
teachers are chosen, or accepted, with no higher 
idea or qualifications than these. Rectors or pas- 
tors often think that it is absolutely necessary to 
have a teacher for every five or six scholars, but 
even with three hundred scholars, ten good, earnest 
teachers, with a good superintendent, and a pastor 
thoroughly in earnest, could not only do better work 
and reach more hearts and souls, but even keep bet- 
ter order than three times as many mere order- 



4-0 The Place and Function of the 

keepers. The teacher of a week-day school must 
pass a severe examination, not only in the branches 
which are to be taught, but in the methods and 
spirit of teaching, and as to his or her personal 
qualifications in that respect. Why should we not 
be at least as careful about those who are to be 
teachers for souls ? In England, there are institu- 
tions and classes, especially for teaching and train- 
ing Sunday-school teachers, just as there are, there 
and here, normal schools for ordinary school work. 
And they have a system of examinations and certif- 
icates for Sunday-school teachers, whose certificates 
are greatly valued. It may not be easy to get 
good teachers, but without them the Sunday-school 
will not hold its proper place, nor fulfil its necessary 
functions in relation to the Church. And it should 
be counted an absolute necessity, first of all, that 
every teacher must be confirmed and a communi- 
cant. If the work of the Sunday-school were merely 
to give a general religious teaching, or a knowl- 
edge of the persons, facts and geography of the 
Bible, this might not be necessary. A good Bible 
student, whether Methodist, Baptist, Romanist, or 
of any other Christian name, would do as well. But 



Sunday School in the Church 41 

the Church, as we know it, has its own clear, defi- 
nite method for the training of youthful souls, and 
the teacher must work upon those principles and 
lines. That method is based upon the assurance of 
the child's adoption into covenant state and grace 
with God, at its baptism. It trains the child to be- 
lieve in that state of grace, and to be sure of accept- 
ance with God, as a member of Christ. A Chris- 
tian from the moment of baptism, it is to be brought 
up as such from the beginning, and not taught to 
wait, in hope of becoming a child of God, at some 
later age, through the process of an emotional con- 
version. It is to be helped to look forward to 
spiritual growth in the means of grace which God 
has given in confirmation and Holy Communion. 
It should be taught, not to abdicate responsibility, 
or surrender the liberty and the power of the per- 
sonal conscience to one who claims to be a spiritual 
director, but using, lovingly, all pastoral assistance 
and counsel when needed, to live in the confidence 
of its own nearness to the Lord. The true Church 
Sunday-school method is not filling the child's mind 
with the accurate memory of Scripture details, but 
the helping of the young soul to absorb and apply 



42 The Place and Function of the 

gospel principles and gospel truths in its own per- 
sonal life. And surely, none save those who them- 
selves have taken in those spiritual principles and 
truths can impart them effectively to others. I do 
not say a word, nor think a thought against the 
godly earnestness of those of other Christian name. 
They may be most excellent and helpful workers in 
Methodist, Baptist or Roman Sunday-schools, but 
we should have none but true Churchmen and 
Churchwomen for teachers. 

" But," says a doubting or timid pastor, " we 
must have a Sunday-school ; we can get the chil- 
dren, but I cannot possibly find teachers among my 
own communicants. There is an intelligent man 
whom I can get, of excellent social standing and 
moral reputation, who is not a member of any re- 
ligious body, and makes no profession of religion ; 
his personal influence and standing would help our 
power and influence. And there are some good, 
devout Methodist and Baptist brothers or sisters, 
who, until they get a congregation of their own, are 
willing to give us their help. And, perhaps, from 
being Sunday-school teachers they may at last be 
won over to our communion/ 1 



Sunday School in the Church 43 

But do you not see how that excellent man, of no 
particular religion, would, by the very force of those 
excellent qualities, be throwing the power of his ex- 
ample, and all the confidence he could win from the 
children against the very aims we seek ? The chil- 
dren would say, " We love our teacher ; he is a good 
man, but he has not been confirmed, he does not 
come to the Communion, and why should not we 
follow his example ? " 

And as for the Methodist or Baptist brothers and 
sisters, they cannot help letting their own particular 
views come out in their teaching ; and all the more 
strongly, because they come out unconsciously 
and almost imperceptibly. And as for the sugges- 
tion of winning over such teachers themselves, we 
must answer that the purpose of the Sunday-school 
is not to proselyte the teachers, but to teach and 
train and mould the scholars. It may require firm- 
ness sometimes to say " No," to a kindly-meant 
offer ; but very large experience has convinced me 
that in such cases one can say " No " firmly, and 
yet, say it so kindly and reasonably as to win re- 
spect instead of giving offense. 

The next qualification I would name is a very 



44 The Place and Function of the 

earnest and determined purpose to put mind, heart 
and soul in the work ; to do it thoroughly. In my 
earlier lecture, I called attention to some possible 
dangers in the multiplication of guilds, societies and 
other personal machinery. These dangers would be 
less if we could avoid the temptation which comes 
to many in our flocks, to think that the more so- 
cieties they join, the more work they are doing. 
When I find a young man who is at the same time 
a member of St. Andrew's Brotherhood, and of the 
choir and a lay reader, and a district visitor, and a 
Sunday-school teacher ; or, a young woman who is 
a daughter of the king, and has a sewing class, and 
belongs to the Altar Guild, and has membership in 
some other organizations, and is also a Sunday- 
school teacher, I am very sure that the poor heart 
and soul are divided and distracted among so many 
interests, so that some of them, if not all, are cared 
for very inefficiently. And I have generally found 
that the Sunday-school work is the chief sufferer, 
having only the little fragment of heart earnestness 
that may possibly be left, after all the other things 
have received attention. If I wanted earnest, thor- 
ough, whole-souled teachers, I could say to each one 



Sunday School in the Church 45 

as the appointment was made, and to the class com- 
mittee : " My dear friends, for the dear Lord's sake, 
I want all your strength and earnestness for this one 
duty. These children's souls are a sacred trust 
which He, for a time, commits to you, through me. 
That trust is great enough to call for all that you 
can do. Constant study of the Bible, and careful 
study of the special lessons ; your own prayers 
for help ; your out of school visits and influence, 
with your regular attendance at the pastor's instruc- 
tions and counsels, these are enough for all the 
time, all the thought, all the energy you can give to 
Church work. Do not scatter your earnestness. 
Concentrate it. Do one thing thoroughly, instead 
of four or five things feebly. There are enough to 
care for those other agencies. Give me, give God, 
your whole strength in this one duty." I am sure 
that there lies the secret of some great successes and 
of some sad failures in parochial work. He would 
be a very poor commander of an army who would 
try to have the same man in three or four different 
companies. 

Next in order, perhaps, among the qualities 
which make a good teacher, will be the ability to 



46 The Place and Function of the 

win and keep respect and confidence. Children are 
keen observers ; they are very severe critics ; quick 
to take likings or dislikings ; to give confidence, or 
to withhold it, and things outside of spiritual quali- 
fications sometimes have great influence. Trifles 
sometimes become important. It is not a sin to 
chew tobacco, but I have known a man to lose his 
power in Sunday-school because he did it habitually 
when with his class. It is not a sin for a young 
woman to chew gum, but I have known that little 
thing to awaken ridicule and forfeit respect. Untidi- 
ness of person or dress, ungentleness of manner, un- 
grammatical speech, the use of slang, a prevailing 
habit of light talking and jesting, any of these may 
mar the relation between the teacher and the class ; 
and, worst of all, perhaps, will be a lack of sufficient 
knowledge. The scholars will not long respect as 
teacher one who does not know much more than 
they know themselves ; and they will very quickly 
find it out. If a teacher never goes beyond the 
printed question and answer, never has any side- 
light of suggestion or illustration to throw upon the 
lesson, cannot sympathize with or meet helpfully 
the puzzles and doubts that sometimes come from 



Sunday School in the Church 47 

children's lips ; if the whole idea of teaching is con- 
fined to hearing a recitation, be sure that the chil- 
dren will detect that inefficient mechanicalness even 
before it is perceived by superintendent or pastor. 
The teaching spirit, the teaching faculty, the teach- 
ing power, are indispensable. Some of the very 
greatest scholars in the various branches of science 
would be failures as teachers. Some of the great- 
est Bible students would be useless in Sunday-school. 
They know how to accumulate, but not how to im- 
part. The successful Sunday-school teacher must 
know how to impart knowledge, and must have 
some knowledge worth imparting. 

I will name one more essential qualification for a 
helpful Sunday-school teacher. It is unfailing, 
punctual regularity. No other excellences will 
make up for lack of this. If I were heard now by 
some who may be disposed to become teachers, I 
would say something like this : " If duties at home 
or circumstances which you cannot control make 
your punctual regularity impossible, consider it a 
providential indication that you are to work for Christ 
not as a Sunday-school teacher, but in some other 
way." This will be one (but not the only one) of 



48 The Place and Function of the 

the real tests and proofs of your earnestness. The 
teacher should be not the last, but the first to ar- 
rive, ready to receive them, showing that they are 
expected, and that some one is watching for them. 
The class that has to wait often for a teacher, 
needs a new teacher. And I mean not only punct- 
uality of hours, but regularity of continuous Sun- 
days. It will not always do to send a substitute. 
It may do in some great necessity, sickness or the 
like, when neither teacher nor scholars want to 
break the bond of interest and affection. But I 
have known cases where the teacher's social engage- 
ments, or trips of pleasure, brought it to pass, that 
some chance substitute, perhaps taken at the last 
moment, was on duty almost as often as the teacher. 
The substitute may hear a recitation and keep 
order, but cannot bring the teacher's heart and lov- 
ing, personal interest ; and it is through the person- 
ality of the teacher that the scholar's soul is touched 
and held. 

If I need any apology for dwelling so long 
and so minutely on the teacher's office, I find it in 
the fact that the functions or duties of the several 



Sunday School in the Church 49 

parts together make up the function of the Sunday- 
school, which was the subject assigned to me. No 
doubt, you would tell me that I have made the 
teacher's office very difficult and very exacting. 
I will be glad if I have succeeded in so doing. I want 
to make it plain that in the teacher's office are 
grand opportunities for cultivating the souls of 
children in all Christian character and grace. I 
want to make it plain that there are also fear- 
ful possibilities of hindering and thwarting the 
life of Christ in those young souls by carelessness or 
half-hearted work. The souls of children are not 
playthings for unoccupied moments of time. They 
are a trust from God. There was One who said : 
" Whoso receiveth one such little child in My name, 
receiveth Me." That blessing is not to be won by 
any half way work, and those same blessed lips 
said : " See that ye offend not one of these little 
ones that believe in Me," and added, you will re- 
member, a very fearful warning. 

I think I can best sum up these thoughts about 
this part of the function or duty of the Sunday- 
school by giving you here the letter of counsel 



5<D The Place and Function of the 

which I prepared many years ago, and which I 
placed in the hands of each one to whom a class 
was committed. 

Instructions to a newly-appointed Sunday-school 
teacher : 

My dear friend : In committing to your charge 
the class I have just assigned to you, I wish to have 
you understand distinctly the duties of the office, 
its work, and its responsibilities. You will please 
understand that you fill the office known in old 
times in the Church as that of the catechist. The 
children of your class are placed under your instruc- 
tion and influence to accomplish a definite end and 
purpose. You are the rector's assistant, so far as 
they are concerned, to prepare them rightly, in due 
time, for being confirmed and admitted to the Holy 
Communion. These things, as definite results, to 
be sought and expected in your work, should be al- 
ways in your thoughts. It will not only give ear- 
nestness and definiteness to your teachings in the 
class, but to your out-of-school influence and prayers 
for them. You will, therefore, seek to be as 
well acquainted as may be with each scholar ; to 



Sunday School in the Church 51 

know the character of each ; to find out what each 
one lacks in information, or in devout disposition or 
earnestness. As the standard fixed by the Church, 
you will very carefully train them in the Church's 
catechism, in knowledge of its words and in under- 
standing of its meaning. And, in so doing, you 
will take occasion often to speak to them of con- 
firmation, and of the Holy Communion as blessings 
which they should earnestly desire. 

You will be expected to train them by example, 
as well as by word, to join reverently in the wor- 
ship, always to speak distinctly in the responses, 
and to sing where they are able to do so, to kneel 
really during the prayers, and to observe all the 
reverent customs of the Church. 

You will encourage them to regular attendance 
at Church services, and will inquire, often and 
carefully, as to their regularity in this respect. 
You will see that each scholar has Prayer Book and 
Hymn Book and brings them regularly to school. 

You will remind them of the Christian duty of 
giving to God, encourage them in the regular Sun- 
day-school offerings and especially try to make 
each a willing contributor to the missionary fund 



52 The Place and Function of the 

of the school. You will be expected to set your 
scholars an example of punctuality. A teacher 
habitually unpunctual ought to resign. If at any 
time unavoidably absent, it will be your duty 
either to provide, as a substitute, some communi- 
cant of the Church, or to give to the rector or the 
superintendent such timely notice that he can make 
provision. If your scholars become irregular, you 
will be expected to search them out during the 
week, and to learn the reason. Your duties are 
not limited to the Sunday-school room, and Sun- 
day-school hours. 

You will be expected to remember your scholars 
in your own private prayers, and to seek in every 
way their growth in grace and knowledge. And, 
last of all, if you find that your zeal and interest 
are failing ; that your class, through your fault, is 
losing interest or becoming irregular ; that you do 
not care enough for Sunday-school to come every 
Sunday and to come early ; that you fail to mas- 
ter the lessons, and go through the work as mere 
routine ; then you will either repent and renew 
your zeal ; or, failing in that, you will resign your 
class to the rector. 



Sunday School in the Church 53 

May our good Lord, by His grace, make you 
earnest and true in this blessed work for Him 
who said : " Whoso receiveth one such little child 
in My name, receiveth Me." 

I wish it could be in my power to express far 
more strongly my estimate of the importance and 
sacredness of the teacher's office and of the im- 
mense possibilities of its power in the Church. I 
am speaking now of our own Church Sunday- 
school only. The reports made at our last Gen- 
eral Convention show that we have more than 
47,000 teachers. The number of scholars is about 
442,000, so that on an average the souls of ten 
children are put under each teacher's influence. 
What an army of the Lord ! What possibilities for 
work made definite by organization ! What possi- 
bilities for great results, if we might imagine all 
those 47,000 teachers reaching or coming near to 
the standard of efficiency which I have tried to 
set forth. Next in its possibilities for children's 
souls, next to the work of parents and sponsors 
and pastors, comes the office of teacher ; I mean, 
next in theory and ideal. But in our actual prac- 



54 The Place and Function of the 

tice, where the parents' and sponsors' duties are 
so neglected, and pastors are so overcrowded, I 
am almost ready to claim for it the first place. 
We have our vestrymen, our delegates to Conven- 
tions, our lay readers, but in power for usefulness 
and the sacredness of responsibilities, the office of 
the Sunday-school teacher is far above them all. 

Take another way of estimating the place and 
function of the Sunday-school in the Church. Our 
latest reports give the number of clergymen in 
our Church as 5,149; the number of lay readers as 
2,316, and the number of teachers, as I said before, 
as more than 47,000. The average pastor, even if 
regularly at the Sunday-school, speaks to the chil- 
dren in the mass, as a school, and can hardly get in 
the Sunday-school, very near to each single soul. 
The time will come, in the more immediate pastoral 
preparing for confirmation, when he must deal with 
the children soul by soul, and very lovingly. And 
the teacher is doing the preliminary work which is 
to lead up to that. We think of the power of 
preaching sermons as one of the divinely appointed 
methods, but the sermons almost always fly far 
above the children, and out of their reach or com- 



Sunday School in the Church 55 

prehension, We think of the great army of the 
Brotherhood of St. Andrew, with its 1 3,000 mem- 
bers ; of the Daughters of the King, and I am in- 
deed thankful for their earnestness and the good 
which they accomplish ; but, when I find that by 
the very character of their organization and their 
work, it is not possible for them to have that near 
and constant access to the individual soul, which is 
easily possible to every one of that far greater army 
of 47,000 teachers, I must claim and assert that as 
an instrument for doing Christ's spiritual work, the 
Sunday-school, both in possibilities, and with all its 
defects in actual fruit, far, far outweighs them. 

Let me turn, now, to another bearing of our 
subject. I have spoken of the function and work 
of the Sunday-school in its relation to the pastor ; 
and again in its relation to the teachers. Let us 
think, now, of the function and duty of the Sun- 
day-school in its relation to the scholars for they, 
the children and their souls, make the one great 
reason for having Sunday-schools at all. 

First of all, what children are to be sought and 
received? On what principles or conditions are 
they to be gathered and enrolled ? It seems a 



56 The Place and Function of the 

strange question. " Why, I take at once every 
child I can possibly get," I was recently told by 
an earnest clergyman. It may be a good way for 
making a large roll and crowding the rooms, espe- 
cially before Christmas and Easter, but for sound, 
solid, lasting spiritual results, it may not be the 
best. There are indeed exceptional cases, where 
it would do well at the beginning of some mission- 
ary effort in a place or district where religion is 
very much neglected, and indifference and igno- 
rance are ruling ; or where, for some other reason, 
the work must have a specially missionary char- 
acter. I recognize that there are two ways in 
which our Sunday-schools are to be studied, as 
a part of the missionary work of the Church, and 
as a part of its settled and definite parochial life. 
Unhappily, the word " parochial " and its mother- 
word, " parish," have lost their reality and definite- 
ness of meaning. The parish, as it was in the 
old times of the Church, and as it still is, I am 
glad to say, in Maryland and Virginia, is a region 
or district with definite boundaries. All the souls 
within that district are the cure or sacred charge 
of the minister of the parish. He counts himself 



Sunday School in the Church 57 

responsible to God for love and loving duty to 
them all, so far as he can possibly reach them. 
Whether they be rich or poor, refined or rude, 
educated or ignorant, devout or defiant ; whether 
they acknowledge him as pastor, or count them- 
selves as of some other Communion, he has a 
debt and a duty to them all. Modern customs, 
indifference, itching ears, sectarianism, do sorely 
mar this beautiful parish idea, but there is enough 
left to make it wondrously helpful still. And the 
true parish Sunday-school will work on parish 
lines and limits. It will try to fill them. If one 
has the happiness to be the minister of such a 
parish, he will have a precisely definite respon- 
sibility as to the care of children's souls. He will 
go first to every household the heads of which ac- 
knowledge him as pastor, and speaking with confi- 
dent authority, warmed with real love, he will 
claim, and claim again, his pastoral right to have 
the children under his pastoral teaching ; and 
the parents' duty to acknowledge and sustain 
that right. There will be even Church parents 
who are indifferent, and count it a matter of their 
own pure will and pleasure whether they shall 



58 The Place and Function of the 

send their children for the minister's instruction or 
not. But a kindly appeal to the Prayer Book's 
words to sponsors, and to the rubrics after the cat- 
echism which state the parents' duty will be very 
helpful; especially if they may believe that by 
sending their children to Sunday-school, they will 
be really putting them under the pastor's teaching, 
and not under some weak substitute. The par- 
ents in our recognized flocks may not always at 
once see their duty and privilege, perhaps because 
we do not often enough remind them of it by our 
loving earnestness. But with the assurance that 
in going to the Sunday-school they will really be 
under the pastor's care, they can be persuaded. 

I am still speaking of real parishes with defi- 
nite boundaries ; and on the principle that the 
pastor has responsibility before God, more or less 
direct for all souls within it, and I am speaking 
of direct, personal, pastoral seeking. When the 
Good Shepherd knew that one of His sheep was 
astray, He did not stay at home and send one of 
His men to seek it. He went after it Himself, 
and brought it home on His shoulder. 

So the true parish priest will go himself, ear- 



Sunday School in the Church 59 

nestly and untiringly to the families that never 
come to church, and are trying to live without it ; 
who care little for religion and keep no Sunday. 
That charge is especially laid upon the clergy, 
when at the ordination to priesthood, each one is 
commanded " to seek for Christ's sheep that are 
scattered abroad, and for His children who are in 
the midst of the naughty world." Those irreligious 
households are as much a part of the parish flock, 
as the homes of the regular church goers. Those 
children of prayerless parents need us more than 
those whose parents can teach them to pray. 
They have right to pastoral love and care, and 
to the best it can do or give for them. 

And besides these there will be families which 
instead of owning the pastoral oversight declare 
themselves to be of some other Christian body. 
We may not obtrude upon them the claim to 
pastoral authority. But we can prove to them our 
pastoral love, in gentle approach. The parish 
priest who knows that in the Church, with its 
baptism and catechism and confirmation and Holy 
Communion, he is God's minister of better bless- 
ings than can be found elsewhere, has the right 



60 The Place and Function of the 

and the duty to hunger for all the souls within 
his parish lines ; and the right, lovingly and with 
discretion, to seek for them all. 

But this positive parish system is to be found 
now only in two or three Dioceses ; and elsewhere 
we find what comes nearer to a congregational 
method. In our cities especially the congregation 
is composed of the householders and persons who 
have voluntarily associated themselves for wor- 
ship in a particular church. The only bond of 
pastoral relation or duty is in their voluntary rec- 
ognition of the pastor. They are free, at any time, 
to sever the relation, and, without even change of 
residence, to put themselves under another rec- 
tor. There cannot be the definiteness and per- 
manence of pastoral responsibility and duty 
which make part of the happiness of real paro- 
chial relation. Churches stand near together 
with no lines to separate them, and individuals 
and children float easily backward and forward 
between them. It is not so easy a task to deter- 
mine the constituency of such a Sunday-school. 
The rector cannot go to the indifferent in his neigh- 
borhood with any claim that they belong to him. 



Sunday School in the Church 6l 

Or if, instead of going himself, he sends out Sunday- 
school visitors, he finds himself in collision with 
like efforts on the part of some of his neighbors. 
He has no pastoral right of visitation. Plainly, 
then, his Sunday-school must consist first and al- 
most entirely of the children of those households 
which, more or less directly, voluntarily accept his 
pastoral leading. I was about to say that it ought 
to include them all. But I remember most thank- 
fully that in my own pastoral experience, I have 
known a few instances where parents and spon- 
sors did lovingly fulfil their sacred duty ; where 
the children were faithfully taught at home, and 
instead of being sent by their parents to the Sunday- 
school, were taken by them to the fuller worship in 
the church services. And in the case of such chil- 
dren we should not, in order to swell numbers, dis- 
turb that really divinely ordained method. 

But in trying to secure all the others, it will be 
found that many of what we call " the well-to-do 
people " are more and more unable or unwilling to 
use the authority which would ensure such general 
attendance. I cannot much wonder when so large 
a part of the Sunday-school idea is in wishy-washy 



62 The Place and Function of the 

library books, entertainments, Christmas trees and 
gifts. But I do believe, and I have seen it proved 
in more than one instance, that wherever the pastor 
throws his own holy earnestness into that work, 
and by thorough, strong teaching, and firm, strong, 
but loving discipline, lifts it out of the shallowness 
of average Sunday-school routine, he will soon have 
full following. Let us give something really worth 
coming for, and parents and scholars will not wait 
to be sought and coaxed. 

There is another side. Every Sunday-school, 
even if in a strong city church, will have more or 
less of a missionary character. There will be 
some outside of the recognized flock, who can be 
taken under its influence; very few perhaps in 
some strongly settled congregation, many in the 
weaker places and in new missionary efforts. And 
then the temptation comes to make the Sunday- 
school attractive by lowering the tone and discipline, 
and modifying the positiveness of teaching which 
the Church has definitely appointed. Unhappy the 
Sunday-school where that so-called missionary influ- 
ence predominates. Better, far better, to have 
only thirty scholars well taught in the Gospel 



Sunday School in the Church 63 

truths as the Prayer Book and the Church have 
drawn them from God's Word, than double or 
treble that number, with teaching weakened by 
accommodation to prejudices, and kept together 
chiefly by appeals to their gratification. The pas- 
toral church ideal and standard must rule. The 
missionary side should be obedient to that; and 
even that missionary power upon what are called 
outsiders, will so be more and more effective. We 
do not win confidence, we lose it, by watering 
down the truth. 

But these are all suggestions about the gather- 
ing ; and it is important to think about some prin- 
ciples of exclusion. There is a very great difficulty 
to be overcome if the Sunday-school is to fulfil its 
functions. I mean the fickleness of the attend- 
ance of the children ; the ease with which they 
drift from school to school, looking for the place 
which offers the greatest attractions. And closely 
connected with this is the multiplication of at- 
tendance. I have known a child to be enrolled in 
two separate Sunday-schools of the Church, going 
to each on alternate Sundays. And I have known 
others going to one Sunday-school in the morn- 



64 The Place and Function of the 

ing, and to one of some other religious body in 
the afternoon. It is absolutely inconsistent with 
the true Sunday-school idea. It should be rigidly 
forbidden. If the child's spiritual training is the 
end that is sought, one consistent method of train- 
ing, one consistent pastoral authority, the consistent 
personal influence of one teacher, the unity of one 
system of doctrine and lessons, all these are impera- 
tively necessary. The opposite is not Sunday- 
school training. It is Sunday-school dissipation. 
No child should be permanently retained on the 
roll who continues to attend any other Sunday- 
school, even though it be a school of our Church. 
In a mission school, at first perhaps this could not 
be rigidly enforced. And my own experience has 
proved that even in a mission school, that principle 
enforced after three months' attendance, with kindly 
explanation of the reason for it, as for the child's 
own good, instead of giving offense inspired confi- 
dence. I could tell of some most interesting cases ; 
but instead let me give you the substance of a little 
note which I had printed for the parents : 

" I find that your daughter, after some months' at- 
tendance at our morning Sunday-school, is still 



Sunday School in the Church 65 

going in the afternoon to the Sunday-school of an- 
other denomination. It is not helpful to your child 
to have her interest and duties so divided. She 
should have only one pastor, one Sunday-school 
teacher. She is a good girl, and a pleasant scholar. 
But for her sake, for her best Christian training, I 
ask you to decide between the two. If you prefer 
the other school, we shall be sorry to lose her, but 
we are sure it will be for her good to have undi- 
vided pastoral care, and we will not take it unkindly. 
May God's blessing be with her." In many in- 
stances as I have said this frank dealing kept them 
with us; but when the decision was otherwise, I 
am sure the unity thus enforced was better for the 
child's spiritual life. 

It will be observed, I am sure, that these sugges- 
tions or rules are based upon the conviction that 
the first and ruling purpose of the Church Sunday- 
school is the spiritual education, under the influence 
of the pastor, of the children divinely committed to 
his care. It is the building them up in the knowl- 
edge and practice of Christian faith and duty. It 
shuts out that too common idea of the Sunday- 
school, which would make it chiefly an instrumen- 



66 The Place and Function of the 

tality by which children are to be coaxed, petted 
and bribed into a weak adhesion to the Church, with 
the impartation of such loose religious ideas as may 
be made to accompany it. Let the pastor say to 
himself, " Here are these children which the Lord 
has committed to my pastoral care. They are 
living within my parish lines, or they are of house- 
holds which accept my pastorship. Before I reach 
out for others, I must first do my duty to these. I 
must see that these learn the truths which the Church 
appoints." And you will see, I am sure, that the 
whole method of the Church's provision for the 
teaching and blessing of children is with this idea. 
The catechism, leading to confirmation and Holy 
Communion, is prepared and appointed definitely 
for the recognized children of the Church. It is built 
positively upon the foundation of the child's bap- 
tism. There are other ways for reaching the unbap- 
tized, or the neglected children of unchristian 
parents, or of those who are not of the Church. It 
is praiseworthy and important to do it. But to bring 
down or weaken for that purpose the grand idea 
and method of the Church's training of her own 



Sunday School in the Church 67 

baptized children would be a very great and harm- 
ful error. There should be mission Sunday-schools. 
There are semi-mission Sunday-schools in some of 
the chapels supported by stronger congregations 
where the gathering and preliminary work for the 
unchristian and neglected can be done, and where 
it would be best done. There might well be in the 
stronger schools, a small preparatory department or 
class-room for such use ; just as the early Church 
had its separate places for the unbaptized cate- 
chumens and for the initiated ; a method so valuable 
that our wise Bishop Ingle in China found it neces- 
sary to establish it in his work. 

But first of all, every well-settled parish or con- 
gregation should have its own Sunday-school for 
the clear and unmixed purpose of giving to its own 
younger members the fulness of their spiritual right 
in the Church's instruction and training. The 
school may be smaller in numbers, but its spiritual 
fruit will be more plenteous and permanent. If we 
keep up that standard of membership, and a high 
standard of definite teaching and discipline and 
training, we will find that instead of being coaxed to 



68 The Place and Function of the 

come, parents will be seeking for their children, and 
the children for themselves, the advantages which 
such schools will give them. There can be no more 
harmful method, whether in Sunday-school, or in 
preaching, or in any branch of pastoral work than 
that of watering down the truth to win favor by 
pleasing prejudices. There was no such fear of pos- 
itiveness in our Lord's teaching nor in that of His 
first Apostles. 

The Church has in the Creed, a clear, strong, pos- 
itive statement and declaration of the faith. It has 
inherited with jealously guarded growth from apos- 
tolic times, well defined usages of worship. It has 
handed down continuously from those same early 
days, a ministry in three-fold order which has au- 
thority from our Lord Jesus Christ Himself and the 
promise of His presence. It has as a steward, and 
it administers, the gifts of the manifold grace of God 
in the Holy Sacraments ; and God Himself has made 
it the witness and keeper of His Word. 

If we do not tell our children fully and boldly and 
strongly of these great blessings, we are robbing 
them of their right, and preparing the next gener- 
ation for a Churchmanship, a Christianity and tone 



Sunday School in the Church 69 

of personal piety even lower and weaker than what 
we now have. 

May God help us to be faithful and to speak His 
Word with boldness. 



LECTURE III 

A few words with regard to the scope of these 
lectures. I must confess to having had a little un- 
certainty at the first. The subject suggested to me 
was " The Function of the Sunday School in the 
Church/' The question arose whether I should go 
into details of the work, or limit myself to some 
larger views and general theories. So I went to 
our good friend, Webster's Unabridged, and I find 
there, as the definition of " function," " the course 
of action which peculiarly pertains to any public 
officer in Church or State ; the activity appropriate 
to any business or profession." And so, with mind 
relieved, I speak of the working of the Sunday- 
school. Having spoken already about the pastor, 
the officers, and the teachers, we come now to 
study the ideal of the instruction. But what does 
that word " instruction" really mean ? It is the op- 
posite of destruction. Destruction is the tearing 
down or disarranging of something. Instruction is 
the building up and orderly arranging. The word 



Sunday School in the Church 71 

is commonly used as if exactly equivalent to " teach- 
ing," but it really means much more. A great 
deal of teaching may be done without any real 
building up at all. It is only the wise, well ordered 
and effective teaching, which has such result. And 
it is the wise, well-ordered and effective teaching 
that I mean when I speak of Sunday-school in- 
struction. (If, in what I say about it, I repeat some 
things already said, I feel that the importance of the 
subject will justify it.) 

Such instruction must have two elements. It 
must deal both with the mind and with the soul. 
The mind is to be trained in the knowledge of holy 
truths, and the soul is to be trained in the powers 
and use of holy affections and holy habits. The 
two parts of training are indeed, or ought to be, al- 
ways closely blended and united. But we may think 
of them separately ; and in this connection we are 
often asked what books, what questions, what cate- 
chisms, what systems we would commend as best. 
I hear of the International Series, of the Inter- 
Diocesan Series, of the Bishop Doane Series, of the 
Blakeslee Method, of the Dupanloup Method ; and 
if all the pastor had to do were to select the one 



72 The Place and Function of the 

which seemed to him to promise best, and place it 
in the hands of teachers and scholars, and leave it 
to work itself by following it literally, the task 
would be very easy. Unfortunately, that method 
is too often followed, and the mere committal to 
memory and machine-like recitation of set questions 
and answers is made the test of the work. But, at 
best, any such series of books or questions cannot 
supply all the teaching. They can be but a help to 
it, a frame-work or skeleton on which to build it. 
In our universities or seminaries he would be counted 
an utterly weak and unworthy professor who 
limited his classroom duty to making it sure that 
the students committed to memory and recited ac- 
curately a set task of words. He must be far in ad- 
vance of the students ; far in advance of the letter 
of the best text-books. He must himself have taken 
in and mastered the principles, the beauties, the inner 
real life and soul of the science he is to teach. He 
must have light of his own which he can throw 
upon and into the text-books. So, putting the best 
text-books in the teacher's hands will not make a 
good Sunday-school teacher. With one who is 
soul-full of love for God and desire for knowledge, 



Sunday School in the Church 73 

Bible and Prayer Book would be text-books suffi- 
cient. Without such qualifications, the very best 
system of text-books or teachers' helps ever devised 
by man would be only instruments for a dreary, 
mechanical grind. 

But before we go beyond the Bible, the Prayer 
Book and the Catechism in our choice of books, 
there are some larger questions to be settled. Be- 
fore the text-books of any one class or professor in 
a university are determined, the idea, the purpose, 
the scope of the whole course must be clear, and 
the harmony of combined and progressive teaching 
is to be aimed at that end. If the idea be, as I fear 
it too often is, to give what bits of information 
may be possible to a child who comes irregularly 
for a few months, and upon whom we have no firm 
and lasting hold, I was about to say that almost 
any method or book would answer. But even in 
such cases, the best will be best. And if I could, 
with some child, have only such chance opportuni- 
ties, I would pin my teaching on the catechism of 
the Church, with the Apostles' Creed as the centre, 
as the very highest and best of the true teaching of 
the gospel But I am thinking, now, of a school of 



74 The Place and Function of the 

settled work, where the pastor's love can gather, not 
so much the chance comers, as the children of his 
own recognized flock, the baptized children who have 
been divinely entrusted to his pastoral care. He must 
plan for continuous and progressive work. I have 
heard a clergyman say : " I find it the best plan to 
change the text-books very often. The children 
soon get tired of one system. Three years ago, I 
had the Inter-Diocesan Series ; the next year, the 
Huntington books, and now I have the Bishop 
Doane Series. " It is plain that the books were ex- 
pected to do the work, and to furnish interest for 
the scholars. Imagine a university or seminary re- 
ordering its whole method and system every year, 
to gratify the students' fancy for change. 

A baptized child of the Church is brought in very 
early years to the infant class, and the whole method 
of the Sunday-school should be framed upon the 
purpose of giving to that child, it may be for many 
years, the training in mind and soul which the 
Church has provided and commanded. Take that 
one child, then, with growing mind and soul, as the 
starting point. The ground is to be prepared in the 
first and simplest ideas of Christ, and prayer, and 



Sunday School in the Church 75 

love, and worship. After that, the foundation is 
to be laid in the thorough mastery of the cate- 
chism, that wonderfully simple and wonderfully 
complete digest of the very essence of the Bible and 
the gospel. And so the child is led to be ready in 
mind, and, if the soul, too, has been moulded, ready 
and glad in soul for its early confirmation. And 
after that, upon and around that mastery in the 
Catechism of the great Gospel truths, with that ever 
in mind and continually renewed, will come, in 
Bible classes and communicant classes, or persever- 
ance classes, if you choose to call them so, the 
growth into the wider knowledge of the Bible, and 
of all Christian truth and life. Unhappily, many of 
our Sunday-schools are planned on the idea of keep- 
ing a child only for a season or a year, and of doing 
what can be done in that little time. If we adopt 
that plan, parents and children will be ready enough 
to accept it, but if we plan higher and call and in- 
vite them to permanent, thorough and continuous 
training, many of them, and more and more each 
year, will thank us for thus bringing them under 
permanent pastoral power. 

What I have been saying suggests the thought of 



76 The Place and Function of the 

what are called graded schools. Certainly, there 
must be a gradation for each individual child. But 
whether the whole school should be so organized in 
its classes is another question. All Sunday-schools 
have some such grading. There are at least the 
three divisions of infant classes, the general depart- 
ment, and the Bible classes for Bible Study, Church 
History, Christian Biography, and the higher doc- 
trines. Happy the child who, beginning early, 
passes under one loving pastor's oversight through 
such a continuous system. Not only the great uni- 
versities, but our simplest public and private schools 
need to have such continuous method. And I can- 
not consent to the plea that it is impossible to de- 
vise and carry out the same wisdom in our Sunday- 
schools. 

Pass, now, from the ideal of the method of or- 
ganizing and teaching to the ideal of the real sub- 
stance, what is to be taught. And for that we need 
not be in doubt. The Church, guided and led by 
the overruling power and presence of our Lord, has 
most wondrously given it to us. When I so speak 
of the Church, I think of it as I wish we always 
could and did, as a divine body filled with a divine 



Sunday School in the Church 77 

life, made up of human elements indeed, with all 
their weaknesses, even as our human bodies are 
made from coarsest and commonest atoms of earthly 
matter. But as that material body is only the in- 
strument of the living soul which inspires and rules 
it, and which is the real man, so that divine body 
which He Himself distinctly claims as His own 
body is, with all its human elements of weakness, 
the instrument of the spirit of Christ, which is its 
life, which is in it, which guides and overrules it. 

I do not, as I have already said, claim direct in- 
spiration for the Prayer Book, such inspiration as 
led and ruled the evangelists in writing the four- 
fold Gospel, or the Apostles in their letters to the 
Churches ; but I do claim for it, and I fully be- 
lieve, a secondary and less direct inspiration. It 
was not without divine guidance and presence and 
directing power, that through all the changes and 
chances of human strifes and errors, for nineteen 
centuries, we have to-day the very heart and life 
of the Gospel, condensed and clear, in the Book 
of Common Prayer, as the practical guide and hand- 
book for Christian worship, Christian instruction, 
and Christian life. When I study these things I 



78 The Place and Function of the 

am not afraid to say, as David said, of the earthly 
Zion, " God is in the midst of her, therefore, shall 
she not be removed." 

" But," says an objector, " I prefer to take a 
higher standard. The Bible is above the Prayer 
Book ; and I feel that I must go directly to God's 
own Word and teach them that, instead of putting 
the Prayer Book above the Bible and substituting 
it for the Bible." And we answer, " The Bible is 
above the Prayer Book, just as heaven is above 
the earth, but we must begin on earth in order 
to reach heaven. Just as the top round of the 
ladder is higher than the lowest, but we must be- 
gin with the lowest and climb from that to the 
steps above." Yes, the Bible is above the Prayer 
Book. It is the standard to which the Prayer 
Book appeals, and to which it must be conformed. 
And it is because the most effective way for 
teaching the great Bible lessons is by beginning 
with the Prayer Book, that we make it our guide 
and manual for Bible teaching. They who make it 
their boast, and claim to teach the Bible and the 
Bible only, have, and must have, their very many 
helps and introductions, their question books and 



Sunday School in the Church 79 

leaflets. And we find our best help and intro- 
duction, our best digest of gospel truth, our best 
application of those truths in spiritual and devo- 
tional directness, our best aid to teachers, not in the 
hastily prepared manuals and quickly-perishing leaf- 
lets of the day, but in that sacred manual, whose 
treasures began to be collected by the first Apos- 
tle's hands, and have been growing side by side 
with and help those other methods, as the Church's 
experienced wisdom in the teaching of her children. 
Whatever other helps and books, then, we may 
have, whatever their attractiveness, or their ac- 
curacy of fact and detail, unless they are based 
upon the Church's ideal and law of religious in- 
struction ; unless they recognize and follow the 
Prayer Book method and are ruled by its spirit, 
unless they conform to its Christian year, and its 
standard and patterns of Christian life, such man- 
uals or books will not be helpful, but harmful, in 
the Sunday-school of the Church. For this reason, 
among others, I am pained whenever I hear of an 
instance where the International lessons have been 
adopted in one of our Sunday-schools. For those 
who have no Christian year, so wisely built upon 



8o The Place and Function of the 

the very order of the life and teaching of our Lord, 
no clear ideal of the Christian life, as beginning with 
God's grace in infant baptism, and growing from 
grace to grace, for such, those International lessons, 
and the like, may well agree with and help their 
methods, but with all other possible points of excel- 
lence, they distract from the Church's pathway of 
training, which we, as true men, are bound to follow. 

But even in that close following, there is room 
for helpful diversity. Just as each pastor, while all 
are preaching the same great truth, puts into his 
preaching the traits, the life, the power, the impulse 
of his own personality, even so, in following that 
same great outline of instruction, we may avoid the 
machine-like coldness of absolute uniformity, and 
give to each Sunday-school its own individuality. I 
was about to say, almost its own personality. The 
first Apostles taught the very same great truths ; 
they had one great, divinely-given system or stand- 
ard to which every one conformed himself. But 
what power was put in their work, when into this 
larger unity there entered their strong, personal 
enthusiasm. 

Am I over-enthusiastic in my honor and praise 



Sunday School in the Church 81 

for the Church Catechism ? Enthusiastic I am, but 
not too much so. And after more than fifty years 
of studying it and using it in pastoral work, it is 
still with me a growing enthusiasm. I have yet to 
find, outside of the Bible itself, anything which can 
compare with it, as a full and satisfactory statement 
of the necessary things ; of " what a Christian ought 
to know and believe to his soul's health." Simple 
enough to be plain to a child's understanding. Yet, 
that simplicity is one of its great glories. For writ- 
ing a helpful introduction to any science, it needs 
the hands and the mind of a master. No mere tyro 
in chemistry could write a safe school manual. And 
that simple catechism was a fruit of the full but 
patient wisdom of some of the greatest men of the 
great English Reformation. Yet, it was once criti- 
cised as being too simple. The Puritan faultfind- 
ers, at the Savoy Conference of 1661, objected to it 
on that ground, and suggested, at the same time, 
among other things that it would be " convenient 
to add somewhat particularly concerning the nature 
of faith, of repentance, the two Covenants, of justi- 
fication, sanctification, adoption, and regeneration." 
To which the Bishops replied most wisely : " The 



82 The Place and Function of the 

catechism is not intended as a whole body of divin- 
ity, but as a comprehension of the articles of faith, 
and other doctrines most necessary to salvation." 
And yet, though not so intended, it is, wondrously, 
a whole body of divinity, condensed into such 
brevity, and expressed in language so simple, as to 
be fitted for a child's mind ; yet it can be, keeping 
to its own perfectly logical order, expanded by full 
and minute study, till it covers the whole range of 
theological learning. 

Many years ago, speaking with a very learned 
and helpful professor in theology, to whom I was 
greatly indebted in my own early studies, I asked 
him whether he had a plan or scheme for the whole 
course of theological training. And he answered 
that he had, but he did not make it known to his 
students. He used it as his own guide, and on it 
he built all his work. " My own summary of theol- 
ogy," he said, " is the Church Catechism. I find it 
capable of almost infinite expansion, and in each 
year's study, I find I have still something to learn." 

It is possible, of course, for one to teach the 
Catechism in a dry, formal way, as merely to be 
committed to memory, without enlargement or il- 



Sunday School in the Church 83 

lustration, or personal application. And when it is 
so used, I do not wonder that scholars rebel 
against it. I lately saw a number of the Sunday 
School Magazine, which claims to give complete 
and thorough helps for teaching the Inter-Diocesan 
Lessons. It had 112 pages and in them all I found 
only three allusions to the appointed Catechism 
lessons ; and these were only by printing in not 
very prominent place, but in very small type, the 
text of the questions appointed. Not a word of 
explanation or illustration; not an effort to show 
how something in the lesson from Holy Scripture 
might bear upon and light up the Catechism. 

But I must not be misunderstood. I desire the 
very fullest and best Bible knowledge for all the 
Church's children. But I am most absolutely sure 
that the Church's Prayer Book method for giving 
Bible knowledge is the best. And remarkable 
proofs of it sometimes come. Some ladies once 
called on me, stating that they were not of this 
Church, they were trustees of an institution for 
children which had been founded and well endowed 
by a member of their own communion, who de- 
clared his wish that it should be unsectarian. " We 



84 The Place and Function of the 

tried to keep it so," they said, " and so we divided 
our sixty or more children into three classes, and 
sent one class to such a Sunday-school, a second 
class to such a Sunday-school, and the third to 
one of your Sunday-schools. And we had minis- 
ters of different kinds for Sunday services. But 
we soon found that this was really teaching sec- 
tarianism. And when we were making some 
changes, we decided to have only one kind of re- 
ligion. We examined our three classes and found 
that while those who had been to other Sunday- 
schools knew most about the names of the rivers 
and the mountains and the kings, those who had 
been to the Episcopal Sunday-school knew most 
about the real Gospel. And so we ask you to take 
the institution under your spiritual charge." 

To use the Catechism rightly, we must make it 
the thread on which to string, and to keep in their 
proper order, the pearls and jewels of Scripture 
truth. We do want the children to know the sto- 
ries of the old-time saints and patriarchs, and to 
know them well, but we do not want them to learn 
and know them as mere history ; rather as helping 
to understand better their own relation and bless- 



Sunday School in the Church 85 

ing in Christ. How the Catechism opens the 
way for such grand and wise teaching ! Take the 
first of its five great divisions which, though it 
does not use the word, has covenant relation with 
God as its subject. How much better the child 
would understand it, how much divine light it 
would bring into and out of the Old Testament 
stories, if the enthusiastic teacher, with his or 
her own mind enriched by Bible study, should help 
the child to know well the story of the covenant 
with Noah, and the covenant with Abraham, and 
with Moses, and then of the new and better cove- 
nant. It would make those old stories rich with 
direct Christian meaning and warm with personal 
relation to the mind and soul and life of the 
learner. It would bring them to the child's mind 
not as merely interesting stories, but as living 
parts of Christ's great work. 

Take the very first question of the Catechism, 
" What is your name ? " so often omitted as unneces- 
sary, and meaningless. How many stories, both of 
the Old Testament and the New, could be strung 
upon that. The names divinely chosen and given, 
and with divine meaning, each with its own per- 



86< The Place and Function of the 

sonal life and power and prophecy : Eve, and Noah, 
and Abram, and Abraham, and Sarai, and Sarah, 
and Jacob, and Israel, a mine rich with interest in 
each. And in the New Testament, the name above 
every name, the blessed name of Jesus, and of 
John, whom we call the Baptist. How large a part 
of each personal history is wrapped up and ex- 
pressed, and could be brought out, in the name. 
And then to tell the child, and show it in Bible story, 
how God Himself used and spake the names ; how 
He called Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and 
Abraham and Moses and others, all by name, as 
one man would speak to another. And how our 
Lord used names, sometimes lovingly and tenderly > 
as when He spake the names of Zaccheus and Mary 
and Martha ; sometimes rebukingly, to Philip, and 
Thomas and Simon, son of Jonas, and Judas. And 
then, last of all, and crowning the lesson, the pic- 
ture of the Good Shepherd, who " calleth His own 
sheep by name," 

Pardon me for seeming to lead you aside from 
our chief subject ; but my own enthusiasm for the 
Catechism impels me. There is not a question and 
answer which could not be so clothed with the liv- 



Sunday School in the Church 87 

ing flesh and blood of Scripture incident and per- 
sonality. 

When I have urged this, some have asked me : 
"Would you, then, confine us to Bible and Prayer 
Book and shut out all else?" And with every 
year of my experience, I have come to say more 
and more strongly, " Yes ! " Whatever other books 
the teacher may use in private preparation, I 
would, for the infant classes, and for the inter- 
mediate department, put nothing in the scholars 1 
hands but Bible, Prayer Book and Catechism, and 
the Hymnal. I have myself written a few Sunday- 
school books, but I have lived to repent it. I am 
sure that the multiplication and haphazard use of 
such books is one of the reasons for our weakness. 
If, for Bible classes and the like, some few books 
might perhaps be helpfully used, even they should 
not be books meant to make study easy ; rather 
those which make study necessary ; which compel 
the scholar to investigate and think. If I could I 
would absolutely keep away from the scholar's 
sight the leaflets ; those cheap and flimsy and 
perishable substitutes for Bible and Prayer Book. 
Their very flimsiness helps to undermine reverence 



88 The Place and Function of the 

for the holy truths they claim to teach. They may, 
perhaps, be useful to the teachers, but I am not sure 
of that. It will, indeed, serve to save the pastor 
from the immediate labor required when, instead 
of preparing himself as he would for a sermon, and 
meeting his teachers face to face and giving them 
his own personal inspiration for the Sunday's 
duty, he substitutes the leaflet for his own voice 
and heart. I would as soon think of preaching ser- 
mons prepared by some central committee, or 
Homilies in earlier English History, as to surren- 
der to such a committee and its wholesale work the 
blessed right and privilege of giving direct instruc- 
tion to my Sunday-school helpers, and so bringing 
my own pastoral personality to bear upon the 
teachers, and, through them, upon the scholars. 
I find, and I am confirmed in this by the experience 
of many earnest pastors, that even the teachers 
are more and more leaving the honest, real Bible 
untouched upon the shelf, and substituting for it 
those easy leaflet makeshifts. 

There is another weakness or fault in that method, 
common to that, and to most of the generally 
approved series of question books. They are 

tore 



Sunday School in the Church 89 

framed not upon the Catechism, but upon the 
Church year. That Church year is, indeed, a 
grand method for the purpose for which it is 
meant, but that purpose is worship. For that, the 
wit of man could not devise anything to surpass 
or to equal that beautiful order which has come 
down to us through God's overruling hand in the 
life of His Church. But worship and instruction 
are not the same, though often blended. The 
children ought to know and to love the Christian 
chain of seasons and festivals and fasts. But I 
am sure there is a better way of teaching them its 
beauties than by making it the law on which the 
Sunday-school teaching is built. A few bright 
words from the teacher about the day, or four or 
five questions from the pastor, as opening to the 
united recitation of the whole school, will do it 
far more effectively, because far more positively. 
So while the Christian year can grandly help and 
illustrate, it ought not to take the lead. It brings 
out some, not all, of the great truths in a histor- 
ical order. But there is also, and God meant there 
should be, a logical order of connection and suc- 
cession in the fulness of the Gospel truth. That 



90 The Place and Function of the 

logical order is admirably given in the Creed. Re- 
verse the order of its articles or assertions, or 
take them in irregular, chance order, or drop out 
two or three of them, and the ideal and unity of 
the faith is marred. They must come in order, 
just as they are. Each article seems to grow out 
of and hang upon what went just before it. Each 
opens and leads to the truth that immediately fol- 
lows. And so also the round of the Christian year 
is a connected and continuous scheme for its own 
purpose of public worship. To reverse or disar- 
range its order, to omit any part, would be to mar 
and destroy the unity and balance for that use. 

Unfortunately, schools do have their interrup- 
tions and vacations. Our city Sunday-schools, 
many of them, are closed for two or three months ; 
and it is even becoming a fashion to close the 
smaller Sunday-schools of the country during the 
inclement winter weather, and the time of impass- 
able roads. The Sunday-school, thus interrupted, 
cannot, when reassembled, take up the thread of 
holy teaching just where it dropped it. If it keeps 
to the order of the Calendar, it must skip the les- 
sons for all those Sundays of vacation, with the 



Sunday School in the Church 91 

loss of all the important truths assigned to them. 
But the logical order of the Catechism is not 
marred by such interruptions. On re-assembling, 
the order of teaching can be taken up just where it 
was stopped. 

Still another objector urges that to keep the 
scholars to long continued round of the Catechism 
would be very monotonous and dreary to them ; 
that they would want more variety. More variety 
than in the Church Catechism ? Why, it includes 
the whole vast sweep of truth revealed from the 
creation, yes, from the eternity of Godhead before 
it, to the day of judgment, and all the eternity of 
glory which shall follow it ! And, with wondrous 
beauty of variety in history, in incident, in personal 
example and illustration in Psalms, in divine utter- 
ances, in every incident in the life of our Lord, in 
parable, in miracle, in apostolic action, the whole 
vast volume of the variety of Holy Scripture may 
be brought to brighten it. It may be made monot- 
onous and dry, if those who teach only hear recita- 
tions, if there are only a few set questions and an- 
swers upon each question of the Catechism. I can 
imagine such dryness, and I confess I have often 



92 The Place and Function of the 

seen it. But I can imagine, and I have known, a 
study of the Catechism without such mechanical 
dryness ; planned with such fulness that it would 
require two years, or even three, to complete, and 
with such varied interweaving of harmonious Scrip- 
ture study that it was always fresh and new. 

The fundamental principles and rules and forms 
in any science or branch of learning are, of neces- 
sity, dry if one never gets beyond them to their 
application. It is very dry work for a young child 
to be drilled in the multiplication table, but without 
it one could never reach the beauties of advanced 
mathematics and astronomic science. It is very dry 
work for the young student to commit, by long, 
weary, mechanical repetition, the conjugations and 
declensions of the Greek verbs and nouns, but there 
comes a time when, out of such beginning, and built 
upon it and constantly using it, there grows the en- 
joyment of the whole wealth of Greek literature, its 
histories, its oratory, its epics, its dramas. And 
the most advanced Greek scholar will go back to 
his grammar and find in it beauties which his earlier 
studies failed to see. It is monotonous for the 
student of music, with aching fingers, to practice 



Sunday School in the Church 93 

the scales till they seem never to end, but how 
skilfully the wise teacher, while never letting that 
foundation lose its firmness, leads the pupil on 
into all the enjoyment of the highest harmonies. 
And the most skilful performer keeps up the skil- 
fulness by continually keeping up the familiarity 
with those first elements. Just as that early drill 
was the skeleton which was to be clothed with 
the flesh and blood of living music, so the Cate- 
chism is the skeleton on which is to be built up 
the living body of Bible knowledge. 

But it is time, now, that we speak about the work 
or function of the highest department, that of the 
Bible classes. Highest in order of time and pro- 
gression ; but, in importance and result, not higher 
than those which went before. And here, too, I 
would say, " Beware of books. Of making many 
books, ,, in this direction, " there is no end." And 
if I could have my way, I would, even for the 
Bible classes, limit the scholars to Bible and Prayer 
Book; but a really good copy of each. Cheap, 
common books help to cheap and common thought. 
You can buy pamphlet editions of Shakespeare 
or Scott for fifteen or twenty cents, in fine, 



94 The Place and Function of the 

crowded type, but you know with what greater 
satisfaction and appreciation and better effect you 
read the same words from a well-bound volume, 
with its clear, fair page and the large, open type. 
I contrasted, recently, my first used, compact edi- 
tion of Butler's Analogy (where the crowded print 
seemed to condense more compactly still the close, 
crowded thought) with the magnificent edition of 
the same by Gladstone, where the open arrange- 
ment, the clear print and fair page made what had 
been hard, easy, and what was obscure, became 
clear. 

I have seen full and carefully prepared books of 
set questions and answers, meant for Bible classes, 
the answers to be learned by memory and recited. 
But whether upon the Bible as a whole, or upon 
special books, the method is wrong. It substitutes 
memory for thought. It does the work for the 
scholars which the scholars ought to do for them- 
selves. If, for example, you ask, " When is Abra- 
ham called the friend of God ; and why ? " and then 
print the answer, it is not learned so effectively, as 
if the scholar had only the question and were to 
bring the answer as fruit of his own study. And 



Sunday School in the Church 95 

those in the Bible classes have reached an age 
where they may be required to do some thinking 
for themselves. And any teacher who has the real 
teaching faculty and love will find such books fetters 
on his own mental action. They will make work 
poorer for both scholar and teacher. Again, most 
Bible questions on books, or leaflets, or teachers' 
helps, are unhelpful and harmful by reason of the 
multitude of the questions and their flimsiness. 
Take as an example some questions on the Parable 
of the Husbandmen and the Vineyard, which were 
published in the Sunday School Magazine : " Who 
spake by parables ? What is a husbandman ? What 
is a vineyard ? What is ingratitude ? What is 
covetousness ? " And then, for still older scholars, 
" Who was referred to as the householder ? Who 
were the husbandmen ? Who was the son of the 
householder? What is meant by the coming of 
the Lord of the vineyard ?" 

And to these commonplace questions, which 
ought to be left to the teacher's running comment, 
the answers are printed in full, ready made for 
mere recitation. It is the merest surface teaching. 
Better, far better, to make those older scholars read 



96 The Place and Function of the 

over the parable several times, thoughtfully, to be 
prepared to tell the story well in their own way, 
and to expect some questioning, giving them be- 
forehand only some three or four good questions 
touching its inner meaning, rather than its outer in- 
cidents, questions which will really make them think 
and search. 

I may be told that I am making out a method 
which is beyond the power of a great many teachers. 
Or, to put it in another form, there are a great many 
teachers who are below the level of what ought to be 
the standard of true work. And the answer is, instead 
of having a great many teachers, have only a few, 
but be sure they are well qualified. And with the 
very best, I would have my standard always a little 
above them. If a teacher ever reaches the ideal, 
raise the mark a little higher. 

And my second answer is that the best teachers 
will need assistance. But it would not be the ma- 
chine assistance of the leaflet and the magazine. 
It should be the living assistance of the living pas- 
tor. His personality will help and quicken the 
teacher's personality. The pastor should meet his 
teachers to help them, and attendance on his teach- 



Sunday School in the Church 97 

ings should be absolutely required. I have found, 
in my own practice, that once a month, for a session 
of two hours, was better than the weekly meeting 
with shorter time. Let him leave detail, incident 
definition, minute questioning, to the teachers, and 
let him prepare, for a while at least, the three or 
four strong questions, and be sure there is really 
strong meat in them. Show them how to get that 
strong meat, and make them see that unless 
the scholars do really lay hold of the heart or 
spiritual purpose of the lesson, all accuracy of word 
and definition and incident will do very little good. 

You may remember how strongly I urged the 
necessity of the pastor's influence and watchful- 
ness in the earlier general department of the 
school. For all the reasons then given, it is as 
important for the Bible classes, and for one even 
greater reason ; it is because here there is greater 
danger. 

The sad mistake is sometimes made of finding 
a man or a woman, devout and studious ; and, as- 
suming that these qualities assure a safe and good 
Bible teacher, to commit to such an one a class of 
young persons just at the age when the spirit of 



98 The Place and Function of the 

inquiry and doubt is keenest, and leave the 
teachers, without careful pastoral guidance, to 
choose their own methods and push their own 
ideas. So long as they are kept close to the guarded 
standards of Holy truth in the Creed and Cate- 
chism, there is some safeguard. But both teach- 
ers and scholars in the Bible classes are tempted 
to feel that they have got beyond those limits, and 
that the whole range of Bible incident and history 
and prophecy and parable, and miracle and mys- 
tery, is open before them for unfettered, free spec- 
ulation. And here there is danger that instead 
of truth there may be taught the wildest fancies 
and theories and heresies. There is, I know, a pop- 
ular idea that one cannot err in reading the Bible ; 
that it is too clear to be misunderstood. But 
when we remember how many of the errors of 
mad fanaticism have grown out of the crude inter- 
pretations of Holy Writ, made by unbalanced 
minds, we cannot wonder that an inspired apostle 
should earnestly warn us that " no prophecy of the 
Scripture is of any private interpretation." In 
Bible class teaching, it is absolutely necessary 
that the teacher must be taught. It too often hap- 



Sunday School in the Church 99 

pens, as St. Paul found it, when he said to some, 
" When for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye 
have need that one should teach you again, which 
be the first principles of the oracles of God." So 
even the Bible class teacher needs the Catechism. 
They had once learned them, but, like some in our 
day, they needed to be brought back to them ; any 
teaching, however bright or progressive or popular, 
that is not soundly built on those " first princi- 
ples " will be unsafe. The pastor must make sure 
not only that the teachers have once mastered those 
wonderful statements of the Creed and Catechism, 
but that those statements have really been wrought 
into the mind and soul of the teachers, Without 
this, the very brilliancy and acuteness of the teacher 
will only be added power for leading astray. Better, 
far better, one grandly qualified and safe Bible 
teacher for fifty scholars, than five smaller classes 
with five smaller teachers, who, instead of con- 
veying in strong, positive form the unquestioned 
realities of Gospel truth, and " building them in 
the most holy faith," may be shaking the faith of 
their pupils and instilling doubts, by ventilating 
their own uncertainties as to the very reality of 



loo The Place and Function of the 

miracles and all the supernatural facts of Holy 
Scripture. The careful pastor will not even leave 
his teachers to choose their own Bible commen- 
taries for themselves. There are many good med- 
icines, but a true physician will know his patient 
before he prescribes. There can hardly be any 
form of Sunday-school teaching with more power 
for good than Bible class work, and hardly any 
with more possibility for doing harm. 

Let us now come back from these closer studies 
to a wider view of our great subject. You will 
say that I have set before you a very exacting 
standard. I know I have, and I meant to do so. 
All ideals, to be helpful, must be very high indeed. 
Some may say it is impracticable. I do not think 
so. There is not one suggestion I have made 
which is not within the reach of possibility and 
earnest effort. And I have spoken very earnestly 
because I am fully convinced that, under God, 
the hope for the Church in the future is in the 
children, and that the Christian training of the 
children is one of the first and weightiest parts 
of pastoral duty and responsibility ; that the pas- 
tor's and teachers' work is to be as much in the 



Sunday School in the Church 101 

Sunday-school as in the pulpit. The way for rais- 
ing our Sunday-school to greater efficiency is to 
raise the quality of the teaching, and, for that, we 
must raise the quality of the teachers. I have 
been told that such ideas as I have tried to give 
would discourage and drive away half of our great 
army of teachers. And I can only say that I 
would be glad if it would keep out all who take 
any lower ideal of the sacredness and responsibility 
of the work. I would like to put to each one God's 
own question : " Thou that teachest another, teach- 
est thou not thyself?" 

In the great matter of bringing the Sunday- 
schools to do their full, true work, the greatest 
problem that faces us is in weeding out weak and 
unhelpful teachers and providing some way in 
which those in earnest can be thoroughly trained 
for their work. The Church is now beginning to 
study that problem. May our Lord bless and help 
us in that study, and show us how, far better than 
ever before, to do His work for the children's souls 
that are so dear to Him. 



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